Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/363

Rh ARCHAEOLOGY 343 the traces of palaeolithic osteology and arts, or among the most diverse races of living men. The process of research arid inductive reasoning thus applied by the archaeologist to the traces of primitive art and the dawn of civilisation, is no less applicable to all periods. The songs and legends of the peasantry, the half- obliterated traces of ancient manners, the fragments of older languages, the relics of obsolete art, are all parts of what has been fitly styled &quot; unwritten history,&quot; and furnish the means of recovering many records of past periods which must remain for ever a blank to those who will recognise none but written or monumental evidence. Proceeding to the investigation of this later and, in most of the higher requirements of history, this more important branch of historical evidence, the archaeologist has still his own special departments of investigation. Tracing the various alphabets in their gradual develop ment through Phrenician, Greek, Roman, and other sources, and the changing forms which followed under the influences of Byzantine and mediaeval art, a complete system of palaeography has been deduced, calculated to prove an important auxiliary in the investigation of monumental and written records. Palaeography has its own rules of criticism, supplying an element of chrono logical classification altogether independent of style in works of art, or of internal evidence in graven or written inscriptions, and a test of genuineness often invaluable to the historian. Architecture, sculpture, and pottery have each their historical value, their periods of pure and mixed art, their successions of style, and their traces of borrowed forms and ornamentation, suggestive of Indian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Punic, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Arabian, Byzantine, Norman, or Renaissance influences. Subordinate to those are the pictorial arts combined with sculpture and pottery, from earliest Egyptian, Greek, or Etruscan art to the frescoes and paintings of mediaeval centuries; and the rise of the art of the engraver, traceable through ancient chasing on metals, mediaeval niello-work, graven sepulchral brasses, and so on to the wood blocks, whence at length the art of printing with movable types originated. And as in the Old World so in the New, the progress of man is traceable from rudest arts of stone and copper to the bronze period of Mexico and Peru, where also architecture, sculpture, and pottery preserve for us invaluable materials for the elucidation of that prehistoric time which only came to an end there in the year 1492 A.D. Heraldry is another element by means of which archaeo logy provides trustworthy canons of criticism in relation to written and unwritten mediaeval records. The seals and matrices, sepulchral sculptures, and engraved brasses, along with an extensive class of the decorations of ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, all supply evidence whereby names and dates, with confirmatory collateral evidence of various kinds, are frequently recoverable. From the samo sources also the changing costume of successive periods can be traced, and thus a new light be thrown on the manners and customs of past ages. The enthusiastic devotee is indeed apt at times to attach an undue importance to such auxiliary branches of study; but it is a still greater excess to pronounce them valueless, and to reject the useful aids they are capable of affording. No less important are the illustrations of history, and the guides in the right course of research, which numis matics supplies, both in relation to early and mediaeval times. But on this and other sections into which the study of antiquities is divided, the requisite iuformatioK will be found under the several heads of research. On many of those points the historian and the archaeologist necessarily occupy the same field; and indeed, when that primitive period wherein archaeology deals with the whole elements of our knowledge regarding it, as a branch of inductive science, and not of critical history, is past, the student of antiquities becomes to a great extent the pioneer of the historian. He deals with the raw materials: the charters, deeds, wills, grants of land, of privileges or im munities, the royal, monastic, and baronial accounts of expenditure, and the like trustworthy documents; by means of their palaeography, seals, illuminations, and other evidence, he fixes their dates, traces out the genealogical relationships of their authors, and in various ways prepares and sifts the evidence which is to be employed anew by the historian in revivifying the past. Architecture and all departments of the fine arts, in like manner, supply much evidence which, when investigated and systematised by a similar process, adds valuable materials to the stock of the historian, and furnishes new sources for the illumination of past ages. Such is a sketch of the comprehensive in vestigations embraced under the name of archaeology, which, carried on by many independent labourers, and in widely varied fields of research, have contributed im portant chapters of human history, and revivified ages long buried in oblivion, or at best but dimly seen through distorting media of myth and fable. (D. w.) CLASSICAL ARCHEOLOGY. The province of classical archaeology is to investigate and determine the results of artistic activity among the Greeks and Romans, so far as that activity manifested itself in works of form and substance as opposed to the artistic expression of thought by unsubstantial means, as in the case of poetry or music. It ranges from the Greek temple as the highest form of artistic expression in this sense to the other extreme of the simplest object shaped for a pur pose by human hands. A stone, rudely hewn with some design, an artificial tumulus, and common clay utensil, each represent, in a humble fashion, a thought artistically expressed in substance, and each reflect more or less accu rately the artistic spirit of the time at which they were made. It ranges also from the earliest examples of work manship down through the historical periods of develop ment and decline. So far classical archaeology may properly be called a section of the general history of art. It owes its independent position entirely to the peculiar circum stances under which its investigations are conducted. For example, when called upon to determine the date of an inscription from the forms and disposition of its letters, which, as works of art, must reflect the taste of the period in which they were incised, it has to bring to bear on the question a knowledge of palaeographical eccentricities. Or when the date of a coin has to be fixed, the standard on which it has been struck and the historical circumstances connected with it must be taken into consideration. Such, at least, is the practice of journals and societies devoted to classical archaeology. On the other hand, recent writers desire to confine these collateral inquiries to within the- narrowest possible limits. They have agreed to dismiss altogether mythological researches, which in Gerhard s time formed one of the principal occupations of archae ologists. Most of them consent to epigraphy being classed under philology. With regard to numismatics, however, opinions are still divided as to whether it should bo in cluded under archaeology, on the ground of the immense importance of coins as monuments of art, or Avhether, on